What to See This Weekend: “Moonrise Kingdom,” Twice

I’ve never concealed my admiration—indeed, my love—for Wes Anderson’s films and in my Profile of Anderson, which appeared in the magazine, in 2009, I looked at the experiences, the ideas, the precedents, and the practices that converge in his cinematic accomplishments. The style of his films is instantly recognizable—he’s one of the few filmmakers of whom this is so—and it’s this very consistency that some hold against him. In the Profile, I talked a little about the substance that the style embodies and conveys (I’ll get back to that here). Stylistically, his new film, “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opens tomorrow, is more of the same. Emotionally, it’s astonishingly romantic (though I’d argue that this is true of all of his films); it runs on the same sense of daring and adventure that has motivated him throughout his career; and it’s got the same surprising blend of rarefied control and documentary challenge that his other films present. Yet this movie, his seventh, is really different—as great as his first six films are, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a leap ahead, artistically and personally.

What makes the film thrillingly different—in content and in affect, in emotional energy and in visual imagination—is its metaphysical and religious element. There’s an expressly transcendent theme in “Moonrise Kingdom” that raises the tender and joyous story of young lovers on the run to a spiritual adventure. The moral vision of the world, which was always implicit and latent in Anderson’s other films, here bursts out as a distinctive, ecstatic, visionary new cinematic dimension. Anderson has always been far more than just an exquisite stylist—his style is an essential part of a consistent spiritual vision. But in “Moonrise Kingdom,” his world view is projected beyond personal experience into a cosmic fantasy. It’s Anderson’s own counter-Scripture, a vision of a moral order, ordained from on high, that challenges the official version instilled by society at large—and he embodies it in images of an apt sublimity (as well as an aptly self-deprecating humor).

The story is set in early September, 1965—the end of summer, just before the start of school—and concerns a pair of twelve-year-olds: Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman, whom Lizzie Widdicombe writes about in the magazine this week), an orphan and a nerd, who is a camper at a Khaki Scout camp on an island in New England, and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), a lonely and stylish literary dreamer who lives in a nearby town with her parents and three younger brothers. They met a year earlier—the flashback is one of the greatest cinematic evocations of love at first sight—backstage at a local church production of Benjamin Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” (i.e., Noah’s Flood), they corresponded for a year, and then, when Sam returned to camp, they decided to run away together.

Suzy’s father, Walt (Bill Murray), and mother, Laura (Frances McDormand), lawyers estranged from each other but living under the same roof, contact the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), who is also Laura’s lover, and, along with the scoutmaster (Edward Norton) and his young troops, all dash through the countryside in hot pursuit of the young couple.

Sam, something of a mumbling nerd, is the butt of other scouts’ jokes, and he’s bullied by his foster brothers and disdained by his bewildered foster parents. Yet, inspired by his instant love for Suzy, he overcomes his introversion and, seemingly for the first time, becomes himself. He’s a knowledgeable scout, an excellent camper whose precise and disciplined sense of order is instinctively yet loftily aesthetic, and whose crisp sense of style is liberated by love (as with the beetle earrings that he makes for Suzy in the wild, the meticulous hot-dog dinner he prepares for her, and his ubiquitous floral adornments).

The hyperliterary Suzy—also considered a problem child by her parents—has a precocious fashion sense (and taste for makeup) and a Parisian dream fuelled by an aunt who lives there. She’s bored at home, and, with her ubiquitous binoculars around her neck and her passion for looking through them to distant places, she lives as if her real life were elsewhere. (The “Rear Window” allusions are apt—her confined existence doubles that of the homebound James Stewart, who also yearns for adventure and finds danger.) These two misunderstood romantics who have found each other stylize the moment in order to burn it into memory. Living their life—and their love—fully means rendering it beautiful in gesture, word, and object. As ever in Anderson’s films, artifice is a means of channelling, concentrating, and conveying emotion in a way that’s all the more powerful and enduring for its containment—it’s also inseparable from adventure and danger.

There’s always an element of catastrophe in Anderson’s films, yet here it’s set in expressly mythopoetic, religious terms, with the local historian and narrator (Bob Balaban) foretelling, as if prophetically, apocalyptic doings. It’s impossible to talk much more about these doings, but the mention of Noah should suffice. The young lovers, with their innocent, daring, intensely sincere, and consecrated love (and the ultimate proof of that consecration, as one spiritually awakened young character says, is their willingness to die for each other), have provoked a scandal. They are assumed by the authorities—parents, scoutmasters, scouts, and even the state, as embodied in the figure of social services (Tilda Swinton)—to be doing something indecent, immoral, intolerable. They’re outlaws, and the law—the ostensible moral law—is after them. But in Anderson’s view, they’re on the side of the good, indeed, the highest good. And he conveys the notion—again, latent in his other films, explicit here—that true and noble souls are in synch with nature, and that when true passion is thwarted or frustrated, all hell—or, rather, heaven—breaks loose, with a deluge of divine vengeance against those who would keep the couple apart. (In another Hitchcock reference, to “Vertigo,” Anderson expressly challenges the stiflingly moralistic world view of that film and filmmaker, targeting not the lovers in a bell tower but the tower itself.)

The story of Noah and the ark, after all, a story of destruction, is also a story of rebirth—of couples paired off under divine authority. “Moonrise Kingdom” poses a vast question: Who are the righteous? Those whose love is true and beautiful. It’s proven true by their readiness to face danger, even death; it’s proven beautiful by their sense of style, which, in Anderson’s world, is the touchstone of great emotion and the noble expression of it—the conversion of great emotion into great and good works, and thereby into the improvement of the world through its beautification.

There’s a morality to beauty, and the sublimity of the young lovers’ idyll has a practical effect on other, adult lovers. One of the film’s sweetest themes is the idealism of young love and how life’s trials make it easy to lose and tough to recapture. Music, books, art, fashion, and all sorts of beautiful objects are seen here as the food of love—a feast that lovers themselves prepare, and for which they gather the ingredients on the wild side. Anderson’s style has never reached as celestially high or approached the skin as tenderly or the soul as intimately as it does here—nor has it ever reflected back onto itself with as poignant a self-consciousness, even self-revelation.

P.S. There’s a bit of quiet repartee, between Laura and Walt Bishop (“We’re all they have,” she tells him; “That’s not enough,” he responds), that resounds painfully to anyone who has ever lain awake in bed and wondered why bother.

P.P.S. After seeing “Moonrise Kingdom” twice, it’s worth heading over to Film Forum Sunday or Monday to see Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed,” the story of a match made in hell.